My 30 Years at PCMag, Part One

By
John C. DvorakAug. 4, 2016, 8 a.m.

It's time for a look back at the history of me.

I began writing for PC Magazine in August 1986 and have continued uninterrupted for 30 years. This is a good time to reflect on exactly what happened over that time, which is what I'll be doing this month in four installments.

I began this career of reporting and commenting on the computer industry within a few years of its inception. The origin of desktop computing, initially called microcomputing, is mildly debatable. Most credit the genesis to the Altair computer appearing on the cover of Popular Electronics in 1975.

I like to think that the real origins of today's market actually began in 1977 when the first West Coast Computer Faire rolled out in San Francisco. It was crawling with major personalities who would dominate the scene for the next few decades. It's where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple II, a professional-looking keyboard computer that began Apple's ascendency.

Its competitors were the various proprietary systems and a slew of S-100 systems utilizing the then-popular S-100 bus that stemmed from the original Altair design. I recall a lot of small computer boards that were strictly for hobbyists.

The very early years were dominated by the soldering gun as well as some familiarity with machine coding, so you could actually get a printer to work with your computer. A lot of cassette recorders were used to load programs. There were also a number of standards to make this work, the most popular being the Kansas City Standard developed between 1975-1976, allowing the loading of code at 300 baud and then 1200 baud.

The idea was to replace the cumbersome punched paper tape that the earliest of hobbyists were forced to use. Needless to say, this now appears laughable. But that was the way things started.

I was very attracted to the scene and began selling software and ran a mail order business called the Software Boutique. I also developed the California Software brand, an independent publishing company that introduced one of the first modem programs (a statistical analysis system that was eventually used by Clorox) and something dubbed SMSS—a software music synthesis system that used the noise that was ever present on the S-100 bus to create music. A microcomputer version of COBOL was also available.

I was a writer pretty much all my life, even working for the school newspaper. My first published work was in the fourth grade. As lucrative and fun as selling software became, I had more fun writing the sales material, so I started a gossipy newsletter.

In the 70s, on a whim, I went to New York to take the three major seminars given by the then-Direct Mail Marketing Association, followed by a number of copyrighting seminars given by various independent and famous experts.

This was a lot of fun, and I found that writing about the computer scene from a hobbyist's perspective was more rewarding than selling. This led to some work for InfoWorld, a growing valley publication owned by IDG, where I was eventually named editor and increased the circulation by eight-fold over a two-year period.

It also gave me the opportunity to work with probably best staff of writers imaginable, including John Markoff, Michael Swain, Paul Freiberger, Scott Mace, and too many others to mention. John Barry and Eva Langfeldt made the place actually work. Maggie Canon was the Editor-in-Chief. She hired me at Infoworld and was ironically the one who fired me when I was established at MacUser (run by the competition at Dennis Publishing). That's a funnier story for a different column.

In 1986, I was doing books and writing the Inside Track column for InfoWorld having left the editors post in 1982. Andy Grove, the boss at Intel, was doing his best to write business columns as a wannabe author and columnist. My network of pals in and around InfoWorld got wind of the fact that the then-editor Jonathan Sachs, who never liked me in the first place, was going to replace Inside Track with some Grove-written business column as the magazine pivoted from tech news to a seemingly more lucrative business slant, like Forbes.

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Before that could happen, I met with the publisher of PC Magazine at the time, Bill Lohse. One of us cajoled the other that I should be writing for PC Magazine and PCWeek. Through a series of rather odd decisions, PCWeek fell through, but I got Inside Track into PC Magazine along with an essay that would appear in the columnist well alongside Bill Machrone, Peter Norton (who was leaving), the late Jim Seymour, and a few other heavy hitters.

In the first issue in which I appeared, August 1986, my picture was on the cover itself. Thus began the 30 years.

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About the Author

John Dvorak is a columnist for PCMag.com and the host of the weekly TV video podcast CrankyGeeks. His work is licensed around the world. Previously a columnist for Forbes, Forbes Digital, PC World, Barrons, MacUser, PC/Computing, Smart Business and other magazines and newspapers. Former editor and consulting editor for Infoworld. Has appeared in the New York Times, LA Times, Philadelphia Enquirer, SF Examiner, Vancouver Sun. Was on the start-up team for CNet TV as well as ZDTV. At ZDTV (and TechTV) was host of Silicon Spin for four years doing 1000 live and live-to-tape TV shows. Also was on public radio for 8 years. Written over 4000 articles and columns ... See Full Bio